Women who breastfed their babies have reduced rates of ovarian cancer, researchers have found.

Increased ovulation heightens the risk of cell mutation which can cause ovarian cancer. As breastfeeding often delays ovulation, we were able to effectively demonstrate that breastfeeding for 20 months would decrease the risk of ovarian cancer by 50 per cent, and that the 20 months of breastfeeding could be spread over a number of children and still have the same effect.“The results of our study would recommend that mothers breastfeed for 12 months to gain substantial effect – and longer if they wish.”

Handheld computers and mobile devices provide instant access to vast amounts and types of useful information for health care professionals. Their reduced size and increased processing speed has led to rapid adoption in health care. Thus, it is important to identify whether handheld computers are actually effective in clinical practice.

A scoping review of systematic reviews was designed to provide a quick overview of the documented evidence of effectiveness for health care professionals using handheld computers in their clinical work.

This scoping review summarizes the secondary evidence for effectiveness of handheld computers and mhealth. It provides a snapshot of effective use by health care professionals across four key functions. We identified evidence to suggest that handheld computers provide easy and timely access to information and enable accurate and complete documentation. Further, they can give health care professionals instant access to evidence-based decision support and patient management systems to improve clinical decision making. Finally, there is evidence that handheld computers allow health professionals to be more efficient in their work practices. It is anticipated that this evidence will guide clinicians and managers in implementing handheld computers in clinical practice and in designing future research.

New Technology Lets Doctors Watch Patients From Afar National Journal With wireless technology, data are objective, acquired, and displayed nearly continuously." That could help doctors better target their care, bringing down costs.

Human neurodegenerative disorders are among the most difficult to study. In particular, the inability to readily obtain the faulty cell types most relevant to these diseases has impeded progress for decades. Recent advances in pluripotent stem cell technology now grant access to substantial quantities of disease-pertinent neurons both with and without predisposing mutations. While this suite of technologies has revolutionized the field of 'in vitro disease modeling', great care must be taken in their deployment if robust, durable discoveries are to be made. Here we review what we perceive to be several of the stumbling blocks in the use of stem cells for the study of neurological disease and offer strategies to overcome them. (...) - by Jackson Sandoe & Kevin Eggan, Nature Neuroscience 16, 780–789, 25 June 2013

As medical treatment is impacted by technology, consumerization, and the mobile revolution, we may see a world where your doctor already knows why you’re sick and can treat you over the phone--leaving the hospitals for the true emergencies.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic diseases contribute to seven out of 10 deaths every year in the United States. Data also shows that the largest volume of readmissions occurs among patients with chronic disease and more than 75% of health care costs are in fact attributed to chronic illness. Sense.ly helps address these systemic issues by enabling patients to manage their chronic diseases through a telehealth platform offering access to home-based behavior and medication services and consultation. The telehealth market, which is slated to impact 1.8 million patients worldwide by 2017, compared to 308,000 today, offers a glimpse into what the most profitable hospitals of the future might look like--empty.

Google Helpouts is a new video service by Google that connects individuals seeking help with experts via real time online video. Healthcare providers are using the platform to connect with Patients. Helpouts is built on top of Google’s Hangouts platform and is HIPAA compliant.

Google says it was created to provide “real help from real people in real time.” People who offer help through the service are calledproviders and can be businesses as well as individuals. Providers must pass a screening process in order to qualify as Helpouts providers.

Once approved, providers create and maintain listings that explain their offerings, qualifications, prices and schedules. Payments are made through Google Wallet and pricing is based either per minute, per session, or free. While Google charges 20% of the fees, health-related providers are not yet being charged. Helpouts Providers can be rated at the end of a session by the user.

People living with cystic fibrosis, growth hormone deficiencies and acne were among the most likely to report using their smartphones to find health information in a new survey from Manhattan Research.

Based on phone and online surveys of more than 8,600 U.S. adults, the firm estimated that some 95 million Americans look for health information on their smartphones — 25 percent more than were doing so last year.

The firm found that adoption of mobile solutions varied among patient groups. These patient groups were the ones most likely to report using mobile health solutions:

The mobile phone holds the power of ubiquity. Across the developing world, around 40% of people now actively subscribe to mobile services. If we include people who do not own but have access to a phone the connected population is pushed to over 50%. This is in contrast to traditional core services such as banking, electricity and sanitation which are near universal in developed regions such as Europe and the United States, but well below 50% in several developing regions.

Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, so why not leverage health information technology in the form of healthcare analytics to intervene more effectively in the treatment of patients with this condition? That’s exactly what a Kaiser Permanente North California (KPNC) program determined to figure out and has now shared in research published in the Journal of American Medical Association (JAMA).

For the first time, researchers have implanted an electrode that can record neural activity while it simultaneously delivers electric current to the brain.

Minneapolis-based medical device company Medtronic developed the device, which can also adjust its electrical output in response to the changing conditions of the brain. This automated control could one day improve deep brain stimulation treatment and even enable doctors to use the device to treat more conditions, experts say.

Both the quality and quantity of sperm start to decline earlier than was thought, and older men become more likely to have girls

It has been controversial whether the quality and quantity of a man's sperm deteriorates with age. "However, there is fairly convincing epidemiological evidence that older men do find it harder to conceive a child – regardless of female age – and as men get older their partners are at increased risk of miscarriage," says Allan Pacey, a fertility specialist at the University of Sheffield, UK. There is also a slightly increased risk of older men fathering children with genetic disorders.

Hard candy. That's the finding of a study just published in the journal Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). Researchers looked at choking-related visits to the emergency rooms that involved food between 2001 and 2009 for children ages 0-14 years. There were a lot of visits: more than 100,000, averaging about 12,000 a year. While most of the children were treated and released, 10 percent were hospitalized. More than a third were children under a year, although the mean age was 4.5 years--so choking isn't just a baby and toddler thing.

Scientists at the University College London have perhaps discovered a method for restoring the vision of blind people.

As reported by New Scientist, researchers have been able to grow light-sensing cells found in the retina of the eye from scratch, thus enabling them to successfully transplant the embryonic stem cells into the eyes of blind mice.

Watch the video to see how the process works. The lab-grown photoreceptor cells are planted into the eyes of mice, where they successfully connect with nerves that send visual signals to the brain. The scientists now hope to replicate this process in humans.

"Siri has become one of the iPhone’s defining features, but for many people, it’s not always the most useful. While some of this is due to the limitations of voice recognition, the oddity of using voice to command a device is also partly to blame. Users often assume Siri isn’t good for much more than finding directions or calling contacts.

"That couldn’t be further from the truth. There are aton of functions and features packed into Siri and, once you learn how to use them, you may be surprised how much you can accomplish without ever touching your phone"

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